Nicholas van Hoogstraten

Nicholas Adolf von Hessen (born Nicholas Marcel Hoogstraten, formerly known as Adolph von Hessen better known as Nicholas van Hoogstraten; born 25 February 1945) is a British businessman involved in property and a convicted criminal.

By the age of 22, adding the "van" to his name at this stage, he owned 350 properties in Sussex and was reputedly Britain's youngest millionaire, although The Times in 1967 and 1972 referred to this status as being "self-styled".

Aged 22, he was convicted for paying a gang to throw a grenade into the house of Rabbi Bernard Braunstein, a Brighton cantor on 12 November 1967.

Braunstein's son David owed a debt to Hoogstraten over a failed textile business they had jointly owned.

Hoogstraten had become dissatisfied with a repayment arrangement the two men had made.

According to evidence given in court by Sylvia Braunstein, the wife of Braunstein senior, Hoogstraten had announced during a threatening altercation at the Braunsteins' home, where he had regularly dined: "I'm a Fascist, and a Nazi, didn't you know that? If I wanted, I could pay £50 to men in London to get every Jew in Brighton bumped off".

In 1968, he was convicted and sent to prison for four years after paying a gang to attack a business associate.

He was sentenced to a four-year prison sentence in May 1968, and sentenced to a further four-year sentence the following August, to run concurrently, after an appeal.

In the second case, he was found guilty on eight counts of handling stolen goods.

At a further appeal in 1970, the Lord Justice Wynn described Hoogstraten as "a sort of self-imagined devil who likes to think of himself as an emissary of Beelzebub".

Thinking Hoogstraten had "built up a picture of himself as a sinister international figure", he believed Hoogstraten was little more than "a child, a Walter Mitty character who will grow out of all this nonsense".

In October 1972, he was sentenced to a further 15 months for bribing prison officers to smuggle him luxuries.

He was freed on appeal.

Also in 1972, he was fined for forcible entry and conspiracy to cause damage.

Around 1979, he was fined £200 for punching and kicking a bailiff.

A huge mansion, Hamilton Palace, near Uckfield in East Sussex, which Van Hoogstraten began building in the mid-1980s, remains unfinished and uninhabited.

Hoogstraten was born in Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex, to Charles, a violent man who worked as a shipping agent importing meat from Argentina who was absent for long periods in South America, and Edna Brookes, a housewife.

He disliked them both and has described his mother as being "a whining cow".

The family also contained two younger daughters.

He was educated at a Jesuit school in nearby Worthing.

At 15, he was given a year's probation for his involvement in a stamp-stealing ring following an earlier warning when a stolen typewriter was found in his room.

He left school aged 16, and joined the merchant navy for a year.

He began his property business in the Bahamas with an initial investment of £1,000 realised from the sale of his stamp collection.

On his return to the UK, he moved to Notting Hill Gate and bought houses very cheaply because of rent controls, but specialised in "persuading" tenants to move out, using threatening practices associated with Peter Rachman, someone he has defended.

Hoogstraten built up his capital through a loan sharking business based in towns along the south coast of England, where he would take property deeds as collateral.

Many borrowers were unable to maintain his unreasonable payment terms and defaulted on their loans, losing their properties to him and enabling him to build up a substantial property portfolio along the south coast and in London.

By 1980, aged 35, he owned more than 2,000 properties.

He later sold the majority of his housing to invest outside Britain, chiefly in mining and farming interests in Nigeria and, later, Zimbabwe.

During the 1980s, he was cleared of harassing tenants, but fined £1,500 for contempt of court after saying of a judge, "I'll get him in ten years time."

In the early 1980s his businesses were restructured after the Inland Revenue sequestered his assets over a record unpaid tax bill of £5.3 million.

On the site of the former High Cross House, a former nursing home destroyed by a fire of unknown cause, van Hoogstraten began constructing a private mansion he called Hamilton Palace, at Palehouse Common near Uckfield in East Sussex in the mid-1980s.

Residents of 2-6 Palmeira Square in Hove took van Hoogstraten to court in September 1999 alleging he had used multiple aliases as a shadow director of Saga Properties (which owned the freehold in 1991) to indicate interests in the flats to block a property deal on the freehold.

The residents had eventually gained the right to the deal, which enabled them to buy the property, after a three-year legal case.

They took van Hoogstraten to court in 1999 to recoup their £200,000 legal costs, a case which they also eventually won.

Van Hoogstraten said of the grenade attack in 2000: "It seems a bit distasteful to me now, but back then when I was young ... these weren't anarchists, they were businessmen, respectable people".

Hoogstraten was arrested immediately after his release.

In May 2000, van Hoogstraten was fined £1,500 in Hove Crown Court for contempt of court for his reference the previous September to barrister Graham Campbell during the case: "You dirty bastard. In due course you are going to have it."

According to Emma Brockes of The Guardian in 2000, Hamilton Palace was named after the capital of Bermuda, where van Hoogstraten owns property.

In 2002, he was sentenced to 10 years for the manslaughter of a business rival; the verdict was overturned on appeal and he was subsequently released, but in 2005 he was ordered to pay the victim's family £6 million in a civil case.

"I ran Wormwood Scrubs when I was in there", he told Jane Kelly of The Sunday Times in January 2006.